Thank you everyone for all of your help. Here is where things stand now:

I gave up trying to recover from backup. I wasn't able to mount the OVA. Since this is a test rack, I looked at the amount of time I've sunk into it already (about the same as it took to build from scratch the first time around) and decided that it was worthwhile to risk starting from scratch rather than become an overnight bit bashing Ovirt guru.

I installed the 4.2 controller, upgraded the hosts to 4.2, and then added the two hosts to the default data center. At this point, all of the running JVM's were visible to the controller, but the vm's do not appear to be managed by the controller. I can't migrate them from one host to the other, for example.

As near as I can tell, the next crucial step is to import the existing storage domains.

There is no visible way to import an existing storage domain to an uninitialized data center (uninitialized data centers are not available to the Import Domain button)), so I created a new share on the SAN for a bootstrap domain, and am unable to connect to it. The error message given by OVirt is "Error while executing action Add Storage Connection: Problem while trying to mount target", which is not really information.

Is there a command line tool for importing the existing storage domains that will not choke on an uninitialized data center?

Thank you in advance,

On Mon, Oct 29, 2018 at 7:14 AM David Johnson <djohnson@maxistechnology.com> wrote:

Thank you for your generous help.

4.1 wouldn't install because a number of dependencies were pointing to dead links. It felt like over half, although I'm sure it was a more limited subset.

I will give these suggestions a try

On Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 4:50 AM Yedidyah Bar David <didi@redhat.com> wrote:
On Mon, Oct 29, 2018 at 10:00 AM Simone Tiraboschi <stirabos@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
> AFAIK https://resources.ovirt.org/pub/ovirt-4.1/ is still there, maybe you could find some issues with other repos.
>
> If you want to take a shortcut, https://resources.ovirt.org/pub/ovirt-4.1/rpm/el7/noarch/ovirt-engine-appliance-4.1-20180124.1.el7.centos.noarch.rpm contains latest 4.1 based engine appliance.
> You can extract the OVA file from there and use it to boot a temporary VM with virt-install and then upgrade the engine there to 4.2 in order to take a new 4.2 based backup that your can restore where you prefer with up to date rpms.
>
>
> On Mon, Oct 29, 2018 at 8:49 AM <djohnson@maxistechnology.com> wrote:
>>
>> I'm looking for a hand in recovering my ovirt cluster from a hardware failure. The hard drive on my cluster controller failed, and I would like to recover from backup.
>>
>> The problem is, the cluster was 4.1, which is less than a year old, but was nevertheless removed from the active repositories back in May. 4.2 will not recover from 4.1 backups.

If you are brave, you can also "cheat" - patch engine-backup to allow
recovering 4.1. That's a trivial patch, and the main problem with it
is that no-one tested it, and I do expect it might introduce subtle
issues. But considering the alternatives, it might be a reasonable
approach. If you do, try restoring first on an _isolated_ VM somewhere,
try to see how the engine behaves after restore (it will not work
very well, because it will not manage to access its hosts - if you
indeed isolated it well enough), and if it looks ok, try for real.

See also e.g.:

https://lists.ovirt.org/pipermail/users/2017-March/080346.html

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1425788

That said, not sure why 4.1 does not work for you. I think it should
still work, although I didn't try by myself recently.

Good luck and best regards,

>>
>> The storage domains are all intact (I think), and the hosts are still running (unmanaged). I've tried to manually restore the engine from backups, but either the upgrade is reinitializing or I am missing something.
>>
>> Any ideas?
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--
Didi